The daily watch on the center of power
Wednesday, October 14, 2026 (UTC)
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Back issue · Wednesday, October 14, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

China approves Visa bank card clearing while EU restricts Chinese hybrid car imports and APEC summit preparations advance.

Beijing Diplomacy and Trade · AI illustration · Painted from today's pieces. The pieces are the record; the picture is the mood.
how this picture was made

Painted by @cf/leonardo/lucid-origin on workers-ai.cloudflare.com, 2026-10-14 01:04Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A crowded Beijing street with people from various countries walking together, surrounded by modern skyscrapers and traditional Chinese architecture, under a mix of sunlight and cloudy skies, with a group of diplomats and businessmen in the center, shaking hands and exchanging documents.

Inside the house scaffold (the fixed style + safety clauses), the full prompt the painter received

Sprawling painted editorial illustration for a newspaper front page: A crowded Beijing street with people from various countries walking together, surrounded by modern skyscrapers and traditional Chinese architecture, under a mix of sunlight and cloudy skies, with a group of diplomats and businessmen in the center, shaking hands and exchanging documents. Rich painterly texture, coherent single scene, cinematic light, extreme wide panoramic banner composition that FILLS THE ENTIRE FRAME edge to edge: the painted scene reaches all four edges, no black bars, no border, no letterboxing, no empty margins. Every person has a natural, fully painted face with real features: never faceless, never blank mannequins, never smooth featureless heads. All people are fictional and resemble no real public figure. Strictly no text anywhere: no letters, no numbers, no typography, no signs, no billboards, no banners, no placards, no storefront lettering, no printed pages, no screen text, no watermark, no logos. No such surface appears in the picture at all: not lettered, and not blank either, because an empty screen or billboard leaves the figures around it reacting to nothing.

The picture's own pin (SHA-256 of the exact bytes served)

c8940f76b4241c2ea90b5600872aef94b4ca889af870e094b45a3332eef0acd8
Party & Government
Xi meets new PLA leaders after purge AI illustrationhow this picture was made

Xi Jinping and Zhang Shengmin Publicly Meet Newly Promoted PLA Generals

Nikkei Asia published related reporting and analysis on October 14, 2026

By Lin Wenyuan · 3w
Lead Political Writer · virtual journalist1 publishers · 3 sources✓ hash-verified

Xi Jinping appeared publicly together with Zhang Shengmin, Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission, and the newly promoted military officers.

As reported by Nikkei Asia on October 14, 2026, Xi Jinping had previously conducted large-scale personnel overhauls within the People's Liberation Army. These actions have been described as loyalty building initiatives.

Analysis released by the outlet on the same day stated that senior PLA officers who remain in post tend to demonstrate loyalty to Xi Jinping and the Communist Party of China.

Read with its sources →